161–170 of 334 posts
To me this whole process shows how great cryptocurrencies really are. The process is live, it is public and it is messy. Compare with how our usual currencies are handled. Behind closed doors with powerful banks or private companies deciding for our governments.
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Personally I wouldn't sell now, especially if you can wait it out a year or two. The dust will settle eventually, and it'll be on the rise again, most likely, higher than it got a couple of months ago. But I don't know what's going to happen anymore than anyone else claims to.
If you're convinced it's going to fall, then it's stupid to hold. You can sell and rebuy at lower price.
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The only support it needs is hash power support. That's it. If enough of the hash power can be pulled into it, then it's game over for a minority chain. Running nodes costs almost nothing which means the network can be flooded with segwit2x supporting nodes, and companies will be motivated to switch over.
I apologize for asking what is probably a bitcoin-noob question, but can you explain (or elaborate on) why hash power has that effect? What does a "minority chain" mean? If you have two groups using different hashing algorithms, why would that have any effect on either group?
Additionally, if the split of hash power is highly asymmetric, then the difficulty of the majority fork will become much higher than that of the minority fork, over time. This opens the minority fork up to 51% attacks. Say the split is 90/10, then just 15% of the miners from the majority could team up and switch back to the minority fork to wreak havoc.
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> Also cannot scale this way infinitely (you need to keep all the transactions on a disk forever). The whitepaper itself mentions that the Merkle tree can be pruned so that doesn't need to be the case. Do you know why there hasn't been more effort towards implementing that yet?
The leaves still grow with the square root of the tree size, which is certainly better than linear, but doesn't really solve the problem. It buys you one less order of magnitude you have to scale to, but only one. If you're growing by an order of magnitude every few years, it's just buying you an extra few years lead time.
See UTXO here: https://blockchain.info/charts/utxo-count
See total TX here: https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-total
Every block for the near future will include one new UTXO, but it can increase, decrease or keep the total number of UTXO the same.
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> SegWit2x is an attempt to remove control from the core dev team I disagree. SegWit2x is a misguided attempt to make Bitcoin "more efficient" without realizing that it puts at risk the core value proposition of Bitcoin: censorship resistance. At the root of this debate is a disagreement about what the blockchain is for. On one side, you have all the developers working on the Core project and activists like Amir Taak…
Why do you say it's an attempt to make Bitcoin more efficient? It's essentially exactly the code base of Bitcoin core with some very minor changes including a block size commitment in the future. Seems pretty clear that it is about control of that code base, and not really the technical underpinnings which are almost identical. I think the issue is that people have a vision of what Bitcoin is, that doesn't align with…
fraud proofs don't work because if you want to prevent someone from creating a fraud proof, you never send them the data that would be necessary to prove a fraud ("the block is too big! nobody (but some list of companies) have the bandwidth to support the enormous bitcoin network!"). SPV users don't require (nor check) the block data-- exactly the kind of scenario where you need in place so as to hide fraudulent double spends or other rule violations.
> the proof-of-work is by default a centralizing force
sounds like a good argument for regular pow change hard-forks. also to be watchful for economies of scale-- but economies of scale can hide pretty well i think, even after significant capital accumulation, it's an interesting problem.
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"when customers are calling them asking why their transactions aren't being validated that they will switch." If majority of hashpower would start mining invalid blocks, there would still be some amount of hashpower mining the real chain. Transactions would confirm, albeit more slowly. For the miners mining the real chain the situation would be very good, because less competition from other miners -> more found block…
The taking a little while to adapt is because their is less hash power, which means it takes longer to find blocks which means the remaining hash power will have less blocks for many many weeks. This means their expected return is lower, not higher, they aren't getting a larger percentage of found blocks, and those blocks occur farther apart. Then when the difficulty has fallen enough to make mining profitable and ha…
The blocks would happen farther apart, but it would also mean that the remaining miners would have much higher change of actually finding a block, since there would be less competition. Also as there would be the same amount of transactions and less blocks, the blocks would have more collected transaction fees -> bigger reward. Also probably people/exchanges would increase the fees since competition would be bigger to get the transaction to a block.
Also, it would make sense for exchanges etc to buy some mining power. That would make blocks appear faster, and also they would get the mining reweards, so it might be net positive. Or just simply bribe some miners to mine the valid chain. Very easy way to do that would be just to increase the transaction fees that they put to transactions.
This is a fight for control of Bitcoin. It is business interests on both sides fighting for a position of authority. SegWit2x is an attempt to remove control from the core dev team, which while technically strong is full of zealots with questionable motives and terrible management skills. Bitcoin ABC and Unlimited have their own parts to play as factions. It's getting tense, but it's been years in the making. Groups…
You're right that this is a fight for control over bitcoin, but you're wrong on who the players are. There's the corporate faction: BitMain plus Bloq and the ones who want to embed KYC and AML into the bitcoin protocol. Their heavy hitter is Jihan Wu who controls %70 of the hash power, via his mining chips and his pools, and his customers being amenable to his wishes (because they want to remain customers). No visibl…
Second of all, the great firewall of china isn't crap, a significant amount of data can pass through it, and actually if the block size gets to be too large this actually damages their ability to effectively process blocks quickly. The miners are not interested in SegWit because it completely changes the economic structure of incentives around mining. It pulls control into channels and reduces direct fees into some hand wavy future about settlement. It's an attack on their real economic interests, i.e the interests that have driven the entire ecosystem of proof-of-work.
If we are worries about centralization in China, then we should just compete outside of China. If you are saying we can't compete than why are we trying to change the system so that we can? Both sides are about corporate control of the protocol to a certain extent with a bunch of useful idiots drawn in on the basis of arguments that are tangentially related.
I'm starting to see a bit clearer on how a fork would pan out: Miners: Hashing power has little influence. As long as there are miners, and two chains rejecting each other transactions will be processed. At first, transactions processing might take a while, but difficulty will adapt. This will create two legitimate currencies. Now everybody in possession of 1 BTC would have 1 BTCa + 1 BTCb. Exchanges: Little power. T…
They fixed the transaction replay ability I believe. I still have all my ETC, seems like it's not going anywhere.
The miners in the two chains gain from listening to what is going on in the other chain, and could just copy transactions and take the commission.
Have no miner attempted to grab some fees? Or maybe the price of ETC is so low that it would be unprofitable?
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Addendum:
It is addressed in EIP #155 [1], where they changed the signing of transactions and put some sort of chain identity to be included in the transaction signatures.
Which brings the question: Is there something changed in transaction signatures in the segwit2x hard fork? Is there already some chain identity in it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> SegWit2x is an attempt to remove control from the core dev team I disagree. SegWit2x is a misguided attempt to make Bitcoin "more efficient" without realizing that it puts at risk the core value proposition of Bitcoin: censorship resistance. At the root of this debate is a disagreement about what the blockchain is for. On one side, you have all the developers working on the Core project and activists like Amir Taak…
Why do you say it's an attempt to make Bitcoin more efficient? It's essentially exactly the code base of Bitcoin core with some very minor changes including a block size commitment in the future. Seems pretty clear that it is about control of that code base, and not really the technical underpinnings which are almost identical. I think the issue is that people have a vision of what Bitcoin is, that doesn't align with…
2. There is no non-blockchain alternative to online censorship resistant cash. So if the price to use it is high, you will either pay the fee for censorship resistance or use your credit card (which is faster, cheaper, gives you rewards or cash back, provides consumer protection, etc., but is not censorship resistant). Altcoins basically act as market forces which allow us to discover what the world is willing to pay for censorship resistant digital cash, and you see this when markets which actually need censorship resistance (eg. Silk Road, AlphaBay, etc.) talk about considering Monero or something else when Bitcoin's fees get too high.
This is a fight for control of Bitcoin. It is business interests on both sides fighting for a position of authority. SegWit2x is an attempt to remove control from the core dev team, which while technically strong is full of zealots with questionable motives and terrible management skills. Bitcoin ABC and Unlimited have their own parts to play as factions. It's getting tense, but it's been years in the making. Groups…
Core developers never had control in the first place. No one has control; it's weird to see so many people applying authoritarian concepts to an anti-authoritarian system.
That is not how power works.
For one thing, it isn't a binary value. It is not that either have power or don't. It is a very complicated thing; even calling it a "continuum" greatly oversimplifies because power is much more nuanced than can be mapped to a mere straight line.
If that is not something you already deeply know, consider replacing all instances of the word "power" with "influence", which is much closer.
It is safe to say that the core developers have had some power/influence. It is safe to say that certain large minors have also had power/influence. Small minors also have small amounts of power/influence, it's just dominated by other concerns, but it exists.
Decentralized doesn't mean nobody has any power or influence, it means a lot of people have power and influence, and nobody is supposed to have enough to simply dictate the result. And while I'm not involved with this and don't care, it definitely sounds like a classic power struggle. Bitcoin was never premised on the idea that there would never be power struggles... indeed, the promise of extreme decentralization is all but a promise that there will be lots of power struggles. The question is, which do you prefer: A system which attempts to structure things so that one central authority can not arise and every thus question is settled by a power struggle, or one in which power struggles are resolved by the rise of a central authority who simply wins them all?
(And if you conceive of "power struggle" as always being a vicious war, that may sound very dystopian. However, bear in mind that all voting systems, agreements to follow Robert's Rules of Order, mostly-hierarchial system such as most companies use, and any number of other structures are all systems for resolving "power struggles". Power struggles can be vicious and disproportional, or polite, genteel, and not a major hassle for anyone. But they're all still "power struggles".)